2019 IEEE The 3rd International Conference on Circuits, Systems and Devices
Analysis of Lightning Performance of Overhead Transmission Lines with Insulator
Parallel Gaps
Xiangxian Zhou, Shaohua Wang, Xiaoyu Zhou, Te Li,
Junping Cao
State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Research Institute
Hangzhou, China
e-mail: zhouxiangxian04@126.com
Abstract—Lightning is one of the major threats to the operation
of high voltage overhead transmission lines. To improve the
lighting performance of overhead transmission lines, various
lighting protection measures are used. The major challenge in
choosing lightning protection measures is that it’s difficult to
quantitatively evaluate how these measures changes the
lightning performance of the transmission lines. Parallel gap is
used to protect insulator from the arc caused by lightning
discharge. Based on a large-scale insulator parallel gap
installation project, this work analyzed relationship between
the insulator parallel gap installation and the lighting
performance of the transmission lines. This work first proposed
a method for evaluation of lightning performance of existing
overhead transmission lines, and then the method was applied
to groups of transmission lines installed with insulator parallel
gaps. Finally, the lightning performance of the transmission
lines before and after the installation of insulator parallel gaps
are compared and analyzed.
Keywords-flashover rate, insulator; lightning protection;
overhead transmission line; parallel gap
I. INTRODUCTION
In the coastal area of China, lightning is one of the major
threats to the operation of high voltage overhead transmission
lines. For existing transmission lines, various of lightning
protection measures, like surge arresters and air terminals, are
installed to improve the lightning performance. It is important
to know how these protection measures changes the lightning
performance of the transmission line, because the benefit of
these measures is expected to be higher than its cost.
Lightning performance is measured by the lightning
flashover rate. Both IEEE and CIGRÉ have guideline on
evaluation of the lightning performance of overhead
transmission lines [1][2]. Nucci compared these two
approaches and concluded that they are “somewhat the same”
[3]. Lambert et al. proposed a stress-strength interference
based method to calculate the lightning failure rate [4].
Martinez proposed a Monte Carlo procedure based lightning
flashover rate calculation method for transmission line [5],
which is then used to evaluate the surge arrester’s influence
on lightning performance of transmission lines [6].
The existing lightning performance evaluation methods
Sponsored by State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Company Research
Program (5211DS16002P)
978-1-7281-3063-7/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Yang Zou
CEEC Zhejiang Electric Power Design Institute
Hangzhou, China
are used to predict but not to investigate the lightning
performance of an existing transmission line before and after
the installation of lightning protection devices. For the latter
purpose, the ideal method would be designing a controlled
experiment in which the lightning incidence is the same from
year to year. However, the nature lightning incidence is of
stochastic nature [7], the lightning parameters of a
transmission line corridor can vary significantly from year to
year. It’s important to eliminate the difference of lightning
incidence when designing a proper evaluation method.
Insulator parallel gap is a kind of power arc protection
device, which can guide the power-frequency arc away from
the surface of the insulator during the lightning flashover [8].
In China, parallel gap was introduced as a lightning
protection measure [9]. The function of parallel gap is to
reduce the insulators’ chance of being damaged by the arc,
and thus are expected to reduce the lightning outage rate. He
et al. designed a kind of parallel gap for 110kV composite
insulators and applied it to 5 transmission lines, which proved
to be effective in power arc protection [10]. Wang et al.
proposed a new jet stream arc-quenching lightning protection
gap, which successfully operated in a 35kV transmission line
[11].
When a parallel gap is installed to an existing insulator
string, it will short the dry arcing distance of the insulator
string, which reduces the basic lightning impulse insulation
level (BIL) of the transmission lines [12]. Although it is
widely recognized that the parallel gap will increase the
lightning flashover rate, there are no existing research that
have evaluated it.
From 2010 to 2016, a large-scale insulator parallel gap
installation project was carried out in Zhejiang province of
China, which provide a rare chance to evaluate how the
parallel gap changes the lightning performance of
transmission lines. This work first introduced the parallel gap
installation project, then proposed an evaluation method, and
finally analyzed the evaluation results..
II. PARALLEL GAP INSTALLATION PROJECT
A. Project Overview
Zhejiang province is in east coast of China, with 101,800
km2 in area and suffers from frequent thunderstorms during
the summer season. To protect the insulators from being
damage by the frequent power-frequency arc caused by
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lightning flashover, an insulator parallel gap installation lightning discharge voltage (U50) of the parallel gap linearly
project was carried out in Zhejiang province. decreases by 0.558kV as the gap length decrease 1mm. The
As listed in Table I, there were 43 220kV overhead average arcing distance of the composite insulators of group
transmission lines installed the parallel gaps (these A transmission lines is about 1900mm, which means the BIL
transmission lines will be referred as group A hereafter). of group A transmission lines decreases by 106kV to 159 kV
Group A transmission lines are consisting of 5450 towers, due to the installation of parallel gaps.
while 2397 towers are installed with the parallel gaps, which
is 44.0% of all the towers. For each transmission line in group
A, the parallel gap installation rate varies from 2.6% to 100%.
The installation work started from 2010 to 2016, while most
parallel gaps were installed in 2014 and 2015. Among the
towers with parallel gaps, all 3 phase were installed.

TABLE I. PARALLEL GAP INSTALLATION INFORMATION

Install Install Installed
N Installed

Z
Z0
ation No. ation /Total Tower
o. /Total Tower
Year Year
1 2010 34/106 23 2015 70/140
2 2011 104/104 24 2015 16/140
3 2012 17/70 25 2015 5/192
4 2014 4/32 26 2015 66/203
5 2014 15/66 27 2016 45/120
6 2014 32/68 28 2016 23/77
7 2014 27/65 29 2014 73/136
8 2014 75/169 30 2014 69/196
9 2014 45/122 31 2014 32/64 Figure 1. Structure of the installed parallel gaps.
10 2014 80/160 32 2014 96/198
11 2014 112/112 33 2014 98/98
12 2014 191/191 34 2014 47/190 III. EVALUATION METHOD
13 2014 49/122 35 2014 30/132
14 2014 51/53 36 2014 14/318
Lightning performance of overhead transmission lines is
15 2014 75/158 37 2015 24/60 determined by two categories of factors. The first category is
16 2014 77/164 38 2015 55/112 the lightning incidence, which include the ground flash
17 2014 42/102 39 2015 61/61 number and its distance to the transmission lines and the
18 2014 30/70 40 2015 84/178 lightning current parameters (magnitude, polarity and
19 2015 95/95 41 2015 107/214 waveshape). The second category is the properties of the
20 2015 182/182 42 2015 45/214 transmission lines, like the insulation level, the lightning
21 2015 49/286 43 2016 30/31 protection measures et al. The lightning incidence can vary
22 2015 77/168
from year to year, but the properties of transmission line can
be the same over long period of time.
B. Control Group To evaluate how the parallel gaps changes the lightning
performance of transmission lines, the influence of variation
To compare the difference between the lightning of lightning incidence should be decreased as much as
performance of transmission lines with and without parallel possible. The evaluation method proposed in this work is
gaps, another 34 transmission lines without parallel gaps are based on the data from lightning location system (LLS) where
selected in this work (these transmission lines will be referred the ground flash location, lightning current magnitude and
as group B hereafter). Group B transmission lines are polarity are recorded.
consisting of 6532 towers and locate in the same area as those
in group A. A. Risk of Lightning Current
C. Parallel Gap Configuration The risk of current RI is defined as:
There are two types of insulators that are used in the 𝑃𝑟(𝐼fault) 𝑃𝑟(𝐼fault )
220kV transmission lines, which are composite insulator and 𝑅𝐼 = ( )⁄Max ( ) (1)
𝑃𝑟(𝐼nature ) 𝑃𝑟(𝐼nature )
glass insulator. Most of the suspension insulators are the
composite insulators, and the structure of the composite
insulator parallel gaps is shown in Fig. 1, where Z0 is the where Pr is the probabilty density, Ifault is the distribution of
structure height of the insulator and Z is the gap distance. The lightning current that lead to tripping of transmission lines,
ratio Z/Z0 varies from 0.85 to 0.9 in this parallel gap Inature is the distribution of nature occurrence of the lightning
installation project, which represents how much arcing current. Ifault is derived from the 866 lightning tripping faults
distance is being shorted by the installation of the parallel of 220kV transmission lines of Zhejiang province from 2004
gaps. According to test results of Li et al. [13], the average to 2016. The probabilty density of Ifault is shown in Fig. 1,

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which shows that most of the lightning tripping faults are B. Risk of Lightning Location
caused by lightning currents that are smaller than 40kA. The lateral distance between the center of transmission
The polarity effect has not been taken into consideration lines to the location of ground flash decides the odd of a
in the proposed method, because only 46 out 866 lightning ground flash strike to transmission lines. The normalized
tripping faults are caused by positive polarity lightning probability density distribution of the distance between
current, it’s difficult to obtain the probability density transmission lines to the ground flash of 866 lightning
distribution of positive fault current. tripping faults is shown in Fig. 4. The risk of ground flash
The ratio between the probability density of fault current that are shorter than 20m away from transmission line is
and the nature current represents the risk of lightning currents, much high than the risk of other ground flashes, which is
which is shown in Fig. 3. The risk of current below 5kA is 0, defined as 1. The risk of other ground flashes is relative to the
because this range of lightning current is too small to cause ground flashes that are shorter than 20m away from
flashover. The risk increases with the current magnitude transmission lines. The risk of lightning location is fitted by a
between 5kA and 25kA, because the lightning overvoltage step function:
increase with the current magnitude. The risk decrease with
the increase of current magnitude between 25kA and 50kA, 1.0000 𝐷 ≤ 20m
because the shielding failure rate decreases with the increase 0.1563 𝐷 > 20m and D ≤ 1000m
of current magnitude. The risk increase again with the 0.0455 𝐷 > 1000m and D ≤ 2000m
𝑅𝐷 = (2)
increase of current magnitude above 50kA, because the 0.0131 𝐷 > 2000m and D ≤ 3000m
lightning current starts to cause back flashover. The risk of 0.0048 𝐷 > 3000m and D ≤ 5000m
{ 0 𝐷 > 5000m
lightning current equal or bigger than 400kA is defined as 1,
and the risk of other lightning currents is relative to it.
where D is the distance between center of the transmission
line to the lightning location.

Figure 2. Lightning tripping current magnitude distribution. Figure 4. Risk of lightning location.

C. Risk of Lightning Incidence

The risk of lightning incidence to a transmission line in 1
year is defined in

𝑅𝐿 = ∑𝑁
𝑛=1 Interp(𝑅𝐼 , 𝐼𝑛 )𝑅𝐷 (𝐷𝑛 ) (3)

where RL is the risk lightning incidence, N is the total number

of ground flashes that are in the 5km vicinity of the
transmission lines in 1 year, In is the lightning current
magnitude of nth ground flash, Dn is the lateral distance
between the ground flash and the center of transmission.
Interp(RI, In) is to obtain the risk of In through linear
interpolation from Fig. 3. RD(Dn) is defined in Eq. (3). The
lightning performance of a group of transmission lines in 1
year is measured by
Figure 3. Risk of lightning current.
𝑁
lines
𝑃 = (∑𝑛=1 𝑁fault,𝑛 ⁄𝑅𝐿,𝑛 )⁄𝑁lines (4)

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where P is the lightning performance index of a group of
transmission lines in 1year. Nfault,n is the number of lightning
tripping faults of the nth transmission lines in the group in 1
year, Nlines is the total number of transmission lines in the
group, and RL,n is the risk of lightning incidence to nth
transmission line in 1 year. The physical meaning of P is that
the average tripping time when there is a 400kA lightning
flash strikes in the 20m vicinity of the transmission line. The
lower P is, the better the lightning performance of the
transmission line is.
IV. EVALUATION RESULTS
A. Variation of Lightning Incidence
The characteristics of ground flash in 5km vicinity of
group A transmission lines and the ground flash in the whole
Zhejiang province are compared in Fig.5, in which the
correlation is measured by the Pearson correlation coefficient
(PCC) [14]:
cov(𝑋,𝑌)
𝜌𝑋,𝑌 =
𝜎𝑋 𝜎𝑌
where 𝜌𝑋,𝑌 is the PCC of X and Y, cov(X,Y) is the covariance
of X and Y, 𝜎𝑋 and 𝜎𝑌 are the standard deviation of X and Y
respectively. In this work, the PCC between 0.6 to 1 is
interpreted as strong correlation, the PCC between 0.4 to 0.6
is interpreted as moderate correlation and the PCC between 0
to 0.4 is interpreted as weak correlation.
For the variation of average lightning current magnitude
from 2006 to 2016, 72.2% of the transmission lines have
strong correlation, 20.9% of the transmission lines have
moderate correlation and 6.9% of the transmission lines have
weak correlation with that of the Zhejiang province. For the
variation of ground flash number from 2006 to 2016, 76.8%
of the transmission lines have strong correlation, 16.3% of the
transmission lines have moderate correlation and 6.9% of the
transmission lines have weak correlation with that of the
Zhejiang province. For large part of the transmission lines,
the variation of annual lightning incidence is like that of the
whole area. However, there are still transmission lines that
have lightning incidence deviates significantly from that of
the whole area.
Figure 5. Relationship between ground flash parameters in line corridors
and the Zhejiang province.
B. Effect of Parallel Gaps
The lightning performance of group A transmission lines
and the number of installed parallel gaps in group A
transmission lines from 2006 to 2016 is shown in Fig.6.
Before 2010, the lightning performance index of group A is
in the range of 0.05 to 0.1. From 2010 to 2013, 3 transmission
lines were installed the parallel gaps and the lightning
performance index increases to 0.15. From 2013 to 2014, 16
transmission lines were installed the parallel gaps and the
lightning performance index increases from 0.15 to 0.37.
(4)
Figure 6. Lightning performance of group A and number of installed
parallel gaps.
After 2014, the parallel gaps installation continued but the
lightning performance index decreases from 0.37 to 0.29.
This is because there was a major upgrade for the LLS of
Zhejiang province in the end of 2014, and the detection
efficiency of LLS increased after the upgrade. In compare
with the data before 2015, more ground flashes were detected
and thus the lighting performance index is lower even when
the lightning performance of the transmission lines are the
same.
Generally, the average lightning performance index
before 2011 is 0.07, the average lightning performance index
from 2011 to 2013 is 0.11, and the average lightning
performance index from 2014 to 2016 is 0.31. It can be
concluded that the lightning performance of group A trans
mission lines degraded by 77% due to the large-scale
installation of the parallel gaps.
C. Control Group
The lightning performance of group B transmission lines
from 2006 to 2016 is shown in Fig. 7. The lightning
performance of group B vary significantly from year to year,
but the lightning performance index does not increase from
2010 to 2016 like that of group A. The average lightning
performance index of group B from 2006 to 2016 is 0.23,
which is much higher than that of group A before 2011. This
is because when choosing the transmission lines for
installation of parallel gaps, those transmission lines with
poorly lightning performance were preclude to avoid further
degraded by parallel gaps.
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 3) As 44% of the towers of group A transmission lines
were installed with insulator parallel gaps, the lightning
performance of group A transmission lines decreased by
77%.
4) Although only the insulator parallel gap is analyzed in
this work, the proposed method can be used to evaluate other
lighting protection measures.

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